Mosque foes launch Bieber boycott

The unlikely story of how the teen pop sensation became ensnared in the "ground zero mosque" fight

By Justin Elliott

Justin Bieber. Inset: Andy Sullivan

Topics:Justin Bieber, War Room, Park51

Andy Sullivan, a construction worker and Brooklyn native, has been one of the loudest opponents of Park51, the planned mosque and community center near ground zero. Founder of the 9/11 Hard Hat Pledge — under which construction workers vow not to work at the mosque site — Sullivan has been a regular presence on television, known for wearing his signature American flag hard hat and talking tough about radical Muslims.

So it was quite a surprise this month to read that Sullivan has set his sights on a new target: Canadian teen pop superstar Justin Bieber.

Mosque foes recently started a boycott of Bieber after he made comments in support of the mosque project in an interview with Tiger Beat, a teen fan magazine, Sullivan told WYNC earlier this month. Now, his 8-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son have been banned from attending Bieber performances.

“I informed them, ‘Hey guys, guess what? Justin Bieber spoke out for the ground zero mosque,” Sullivan explained to Salon in an interview. “My little girl took down his poster and said she didn’t want to have nothing to do with him anymore. These are my kids. They’re living this thing.”

A Facebook page has been set up by an ally of Sullivan publicizing the boycott of Bieber and several other pro-mosque celebrities. It has attracted nearly 500 fans.

Intrigued by the idea that Bieber would weigh in on one of the most polarizing political issues of the day, I began looking for his interview with Tiger Beat.

The magazine does cover Bieber obsessively (“Justin Bieber Dodges Dating Selena Gomez Question!” and “Did Justin Bieber Grow a Mustache?” are two recent features). But I couldn’t find any sign of an interview on Park51. There is, however, a post on the website CelebJihad.com purporting to describe a Tiger Beat interview. It reads in part:

In an interview with Tiger Beat, the pop sensation stressed that freedom of religion is what makes America great, and went on to say that those who oppose the Mosque are motivated by bigotry.

“Muslims should be allowed to build a mosque anywhere they want,” the singer said. “Coming from Canada, I’m not used to this level of intolerance, eh.”

Bieber went on to say that Muslims are “super cool,” Christians are “lame-o-rama,” and that the mosque will help “start a dialogue” with all religions about which Justin Bieber song is the most awesome.

“I was like seven when September 11th went down, and frankly I’m surprised people are still going on about it. Move on, already!”

Celebjihad.com seems to specialize in softcore celebrity porn, but poke around a bit and you find this disclaimer:

CelebJihad.com is a satirical website containing published rumors, speculation, assumptions, opinions, fiction as well as factual information

I was able to reach the proprietor of the site, who confirmed that the Bieber item is in fact a hoax. “[T]he fact that some people take it seriously is hilariously depressing,” he said in an e-mail.

It’s a hoax, though, that has spread around the Web, and succeeded in taking in several anti-mosque activists. They recently discussed the issue on the wall of the Facebook boycott page:

Megan Alpert: Why is Justin Beiber on Boycott companies for ground zero?? He’s a kid. lol

Cynthia Bloemer: That stupid dhimmi kid spoke out for the Mosque. Idiot kid!

Megan Alpert: That’s crazy Cynthia. I totally missed that all together.

Administrator: Justin took an adult position and spoke out in support of the mosque in tigar beat magazine. He one of the most influential teen sensations, reaching millions of impressionable kids. If he is going to play like the big boys he better expect some back lash…

Megan Alpert: Well then he is leading all the young teens into a funny way of thinking. He was just a baby when the attack came upon us. He has no clue what we are up against. He is very lost.

Walter H Steinlauf: Justin Beiber is “fishing in DEEP water” now. I eat people like that for breakfast.

Bieber’s publicist did not immediately return a message seeking comment about the hoax and Bieber’s views on the mosque.

: Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott

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The social media tool is being taken up as an actual measure of value and influence. And we should be wary

By Bonnie Stewart

The social media service that is bad for your soul

Are you your metrics? (Credit: Realinemedia via Shutterstock)

Topics:Klout, Social Media, Justin Bieber

You’ve heard of Twitter. Twitter is the contemporary canary in the coal mine of world events. A coup? An outrage? A celebrity death? Twitter gets the news out fastest, even mourning the loss of leading figures before they themselves hear they’re dead (sorry about that, Gordon Lightfoot).

You may not have heard of Klout — not yet.

But that doesn’t matter. If you’re on Twitter, or even Facebook, Klout has heard of you. And Klout has ranked you, with a single tidy number meant to sum up your influence and engagement in the social media sphere. Klout.com is a social media analytics company based in San Francisco. Three years ago, it began ranking Twitter users according to the splash their links and witty repartee made among their followers. Since then, it’s grown to include activity across social media platforms, and has established itself as a major arbiter of influence in social media circles. Klout, in effect, has clout.

Late last month, Klout altered its ranking algorithm. The Twitter canaries promptly launched into alarm mode, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. An #OccupyKlout movement even sprang up on Twitter.

The reaction pointed out three significant shifts now occurring in social media.

Klout defines influence as “the ability to drive action.” It claims to measure influence across social media platforms: it collects data on users’ engagement on Twitter, Facebook, G+, Flickr, etc., and collates them. You go up if you’re doing well, down if you’re losing influence. Or, say, if you spent a whole day offline. Merciful heavens.

If you’ve been in the habit of checking your Klout, you likely saw a change in your score last month. If you had Klout anywhere above, oh, 55 or so, you may have seen a drop. The system ranks out of an ostensible 100, but it grades on what my undergraduate professors affectionately called “the British system”: Basically, nobody except a superstar gets higher than 75. Justin Bieber, King of Klout, hovers close to 100. Ellen DeGeneres, that teacher’s pet, has an 87. Poor Jon Stewart only scores 73.

Klout had suggested before the shift that the majority of users would see their score stay the same or go down, but a straw poll of the canaries tweeting out sturm und drang on my Twitter feed on Oct. 27 suggests that the people clipped hardest by the new algorithm were the bigger fish in the non-celebrity seas, the ones who’d actually noticed they had Klout.

(Full disclosure: I went from an all-time high of 64 to a 58. Pass the hankies.)

The three shifts

Talking about Klout scores to a non-Klout-using audience sounds a bit ridiculous. Mind you, so did talking about Twitter in 2007. In the academic presentations I give, mentioning Klout is akin to bragging about the high score I got in Super Mario Brothers back in 1993. Except that unlike Super Mario, Klout and its ilk — the increasingly complex measurements of influence known as metrics — are poised for real-world impact far beyond social media. Like Twitter.

Social media has involved metrics from the beginning: comments, Technorati rankings, numbers of Twitter followers. These have always been visible measures of how big a fish one might be in the social media pond.

When Klout emerged, however, in 2008, it was something new. It was one of the first tools to measure both reach — how many people you influence — and scale — how much you influence them. Klout’s algorithms also take into account the influence of those you influence. Meaning, on the surface, if you engage with leaders in your community or little corner of the Internet, you yourself are more likely to exert leadership influence.

Klout has been embraced as an objective third-party tool for business to tell which self-promoting social media gurus actually have the know-how and influence they claim they have. Thus, even though many of us may not even be aware we have Klout, it’s already driving hiring in social media spheres. Its algorithm is being taken up as a factual assessment.

And that’s where three shifts in social media’s societal role become evident.

1. Social media has leaked beyond the boundaries of online interaction.

In truth, social media was never contained by the bits and bytes of computers. From the beginning, social media’s social-ness meant that it linked people in ways that stretched far beyond the boundaries of their digital lives. But as people’s Twitter and Facebook and blog identities become more and more central, integrated parts of their everyday living, and more and more people use these platforms, the actions and practices valued and reinforced online begin to bleed out into the larger society. Once a practice becomes normalized in one dominant environment of one’s life, it’s human nature to carry it over into others.

Social media is becoming a powerful force in society like the education system, or the corporate world. Social media has a profound influence on the daily practices of a majority of members of our global culture. As of July 2011, Facebook had 750 million users, a number far exceeding the population of most countries on the planet.

And as social media practices shift from their open source, peer-to-peer connection origins to an emphasis on summative rankings and metrics, we need to pay attention.

Why?

2. Because we’re being influenced by our own “influence.”

Klout isn’t only measuring us, it’s assessing us. It’s designed on behaviorist principles, with rewards and virtual pats on the head when we — ratlike, often not entirely sure what we did to warrant the praise — succeed on the terms its algorithm values, and framing losses in score with banners that proclaim, “Oh no! Your Klout has fallen -1 in the past 2 days!”

We are highly conditionable beings. Klout is conditioning us to care about Klout, and to value ourselves — in the identity economy of social media — in terms of it. It works to devalue the nature of many social media communities, particularly those whose networks and relationships aren’t based entirely in use value.

In the new Klout, I now get notices along the bottom of my screen about which of my contacts have gone down in score recently: in case I want to dump them, I assume, like dead weight. Bye, Mom! Farewell, shy cousin Ernie! Adios, infrequent Twitter user! It’s all business.

Social media wasn’t intended to be all business, especially business as usual. Social media is relational: Part of its phenomenal success is that it’s enabled people to connect on terms far beyond those of use-value networking.

But because Klout rewards use-value networking over other forms of engagement, it fosters an increasingly use-value environment. The peer-to-peer relationality of social media is undermined by the kind of behavior that cultivates status over relationships. Status is part of the game. But when it becomes the whole game, the broad, rhizomatic networks get boxed in and wither, and then we’re back to something a lot less interesting than social media. And like the new Google Reader, a lot less social.

Yes, there is a pattern here. We are gradually being directed away from sociality and toward businesslike behaviors by the business interests that design and profit from the platforms we use.

Social media, which was once a bit of a rogue blowing smoke at the establishment, is being taken in hand and given a tie and a briefcase. We’re like the rebel who’s been told s/he got the highest mark on a class test: We suddenly don’t know what to do with ourselves.

The problem: The test was rigged. And will always be rigged.

3. We’re allowing a metric to do a human’s job.

I’m not saying Klout isn’t trying, in terms of assessing influence and engagement fairly. The problem is, it can’t.

Klout attempts to boil down complex social interactions into a single, absolute number.

Systems of standardization, which is essentially what Klout is, have a particular potent history of this kind of reductionism. Until the 19th century, education systems didn’t use grades as we know them. As they became standardized within the broad societal push for public education, they became a shared language and currency for everyone enrolled in that system. You know what an A means, more or less. So does everybody else.

For over a hundred years, now, we’ve conditioned generations of kids to see themselves and their capacities in terms of these standardized letters: even though we KNOW that an A with sweet ol’ Mr. Wilson is just plain easier to get than an A with IronFist Ives, the history teacher.

Rankings are useful as relative assessments: My score on Klout in relation to yours, or on Mr. Ives’ history test this month as compared to last, can be indicative of meaningful change.

But my Klout score does not tell you — and cannot tell you — what kind of influence I have in my community, not really. Such scoring may be handy in a competitive neoliberal economy looking to quantify and compare abilities, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually valid.

On Babble.com, the day of the algorithm shift, Cecily Kellogg wrote, “Whether we love or hate Klout, the brands and agencies we work with utilize Klout scores to make determinations about our perceived value, so this is an issue important to us.”

It should be an important issue to anyone using social media. Unless, of course, you believe in a world where Justin Bieber is actually the most influential human alive.

What Klout is good for is giving people a reflective surface on which to see their own social media activities and interactions, relative to themselves and the context of their communities. Klout is good for letting you know whether you’re succeeding in your efforts to improve: It is not and cannot be a measure of success.

Klout is only valuable if one is embedded enough in the relational networks it claims to assess to know when to take it with a more than a grain of salt. We need to stop handing over so much power to metrics. They have a place. But it’s their use-value we need to assess, not the other way around.

: Bonnie Stewart is a Ph.D student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, researching social media identity and education. She blogs ideas at http://theory.cribchronicles.com and creative non-fiction at http://cribchronicles.com. More Bonnie Stewart

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The pop star might be a top-selling artist when it comes to music, but put him in print and he fails to find sales

By Drew Grant

Bieber not so beloved of readers.

Topics:Justin Bieber, Celebrity, Teenagers, Television

Back in February, Justin Bieber caused the media news cycle to capsize when he spoke to Rolling Stone magazine about his views on abortion and universal healthcare. He was against the former and pro the latter … something which kind of makes sense when you realize he was raised by a religious Canadian teen mom.

But while Bieber’s statements caused a backlash so intense that he had to cut his hair in penance, it’s unclear how many people picked up the offending issue. Though Wenner Media has yet to release its 2011 newsstand sales, Justin’s Vanity Fair cover (also in February) sold only 246,000 copies, making it the lowest-ranked issue of the Condé Nast publication in 12 years.

: Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant

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Today's catch: Justin Bieber jumped in NYC, the worst TV shows to love, and South Africa's coolest rock band

By Drew Grant

Justin Bieber, pre-Macy's attack.

Topics:Pop five, Celebrity, George Clooney, Justin Bieber, Music, Television

1. Lost roles of the day: Nicolas Cage and Gary Oldman were up to star in the film “Dumb and Dumber.” I imagine it would have been a much more disturbing movie if that had gone through.

2. Breakup of the day: George Clooney and Italian TV personality Elisabetta Canalis. Since she told the press two weeks ago she wanted to marry the movie star, I doubt it was one of those mutual separation things.

: Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant

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Never say never, especially in the case of a young Canadian pop star becoming a CMT crossover artist

By Drew Grant

Is Bieber country strong?

Topics:Justin Bieber, Celebrity, Music, Taylor Swift, Television

Justin Bieber won a CMT Music Award last night. Why not? If Gwyneth Paltrow gets to perform at the CMA awards (which is different than the CMT Music Awards, but not really), why shouldn’t little Bieber get a statue? At this point, Hollywood has so infiltrated the country music scene – we can thank Nicole Kidman pairing up with Keith Urban for that one – and vice-versa (Lady Antebellum sweeping the Grammys this year, Taylor Swift, etc.), that it’s difficult to claim that country music isn’t already mainstream music.

: Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant

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Every frat boy's dream come true, the pop star bejewels Stewie like a big boy

By Drew Grant

Stewie Griffin, status symbol.

Topics:Justin Bieber, Family Guy, Music, Television

Remember when everyone got upset because Justin Bieber went to Rolling Stone and said he supported universal healthcare but was pro-life? It was like we were treating the 17-year-old like an adult with opinions that deserve debating! So silly!

Because just for reference, Justin Bieber wears a necklace of Stewie Griffin from “Family Guy” around town, and that necklace costs $25,000. I would not take his opinion on the best part of Epcot Center seriously, let alone his views on abortion.